Let Everything Happen to You

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

I have this fragment of Rilke’s poem on the wall in my office, as a reminder and support to my clients. Recently, I’ve been needing a fair amount of reminding myself. This week, I’ve been hit a few times by intense waves of sadness and grief. There’s some reason for this in my personal life; my cat Jules died recently, and New Year’s Eve will be the 30th anniversary of my mother’s death. And Christmas was her birthday. So it’s a mixed up season for me. But that’s been true for years and these waves are different, and feel out of proportion to the actual circumstances, which I find is often a clue that there’s something else involved.

Certainly, with grief, one loss can activate feelings around other losses, so Jules’ death could be catalyzing some of this. Nonetheless, it was pretty surprising the other morning to be out running on the mesa, taking in the beauty of the sunrise, the snowy mountains glowing pink with the dawn, and then almost collapsing with sobs. Just keep going was about all there was to do, as stopping for long in the cold wasn’t going to help. So I kept going, and then I swam and I wrote and I went to work, and things seemed “normal” again for a while.

This morning, additional waves arrived, followed eventually by an aha. I realized that these recent big waves of sadness have hit after I’ve been in the car. I usually put on NPR when driving, updating myself on the news. I usually turn it off pretty quickly as well, as my tolerance is limited. What hit me this time is that I am deeply saddened by this tax bill nonsense in congress. Non-sense seems the appropriate word or phrase here, given the difference between what is said about the bill and what actual analysis reveals. Taxes may decrease for some, but deficits will grow, services of all sorts will be reduced and in the end, I expect very little good to come of this.

My deep reactivity arises from what these political shenanigans feel like. These actions feel greedy and mean-spirited, with little regard for the quality of life for the commonweal, the vast majority of humans in our country, or the land and planet upon which we all live.  To me, it feels terribly wrong, the very opposite of health, and bears no resemblance to what I consider public service.

Given my line of work, first as a family physician and now as a somatic psychotherapist primarily working with trauma, I’ve done a lot of thinking about adversity in life. I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of stuff does not make sense on this, the incarnated side of the veil, but that there is some way that it does make sense from the other side, the spiritual side, whatever that may be. Somehow, we humans are here on earth working out stuff, learning, growing, problem-solving, addressing issues that we only partially understand.

Like any learning process, an individual may try out many ways of doing something prior to actually doing what it is they wish to do. Its one thing to watch a toddler fall and stumble as they learn to run and walk, its quite another to watch someone make choices that will lead to what feels like a terrible outcome. With a toddler, I can take away the fork before they stick it in the electrical outlet. I can’t stop an alcoholic from drinking, that’s their journey. That said, its very difficult for me to watch what seems to me to be the power and greed addicted behaviors of our current government at work. This may be what we as a society need to do in order to work out a problem or increase our collective understanding of how to be in the world. But oh my, it grieves me sorely to witness this behavior.

While I do not subscribe to a particular religious framework for all of this, I do have my beliefs and guiding principles. Kindness, compassion, generosity, and empathy lead my list. Sometimes these can all go under the heading of love, not the soft, mushy stuff of infatuation and dime store valentines, but the fierce, clear-seeing, speaking truth to power kind of love. Now my challenge is to be fierce in my understanding, compassionate to myself and all others, including those whose behaviors I have such difficulty with, and somehow just keep going, bringing my best self to the fore as much as I can.

I am so sad that we are going to such lengths to learn these lessons the hard way. I don’t want to be an adult right now. May I be excused? Once again, I remind myself. Just keep going, no feeling is final.

Addendum

I wrote this last night and scheduled it to post early this morning. And then, as one would do with any tired and cranky child, I put myself to bed early. After a good-enough sleep, I was enjoying my morning coffee and checking in online. I was greeted with some loves from some of my Facebook friends who had read this, and a pair of very thoughtful responses from WordPress readers. Community makes a difference. This morning, I’m okay with being an adult.

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year here in the northern hemisphere. The major celebrations of this time of year, whether the pagan solstice, Christmas or Hanukkah, are all basically about the miracle of finding light in the darkness. My miracles today: I have more hope today than yesterday, I have community, I have a warm home and enough to eat, so welcome on this cold and snowy day.

Albert Einstein, the great physicist and thinker, famously said “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is a miracle.”  I will take the latter.

<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/miraculous/”>Miraculous</a>